High-Performance Teams Overview
Management and Teams
The Problem with ordinary Teams
The use of teams has become commonplace driven by the need to be more competitive and driven by changes in business technology.
Current team organisational structures have limitations, they tend to be silo-based, facilitate only existing skillsets, are almost exclusively project-driven and suffer from poorly integrated processes.
They are unable to rapidly respond to changing business technologies and the need to be more competitive. They do not employ modern management behaviours or techniques and they largely just reinvent as against innovate.
High-Performance Teams
High-Performance Teams do not suffer from these limitations. People are highly skilled and can interchange their roles, leadership within the team is not vested in a single individual; instead, the leadership role is taken up by various team members, according to the need at the time .
Scott Keller and Mary Meaney in ‘Leading Organisations: Ten Timeless Truths’ states that.
Over a decade they asked more than 5000 executives to think about their “peak experience” as a High-Performance team member and to write down the word or words that describe that environment. The results are remarkably consistent and reveal three key dimensions of great teamwork.
The first is alignment on direction, where there is a shared belief about what the company is striving toward and the role of the team in getting there.
The second is high-quality interaction, characterised by trust, open communication, and a willingness to embrace conflict.
The third is a strong sense of renewal, meaning an environment in which team members are energised because they feel they can take risks, innovate and learn from outside ideas.
Prachi Juneja of Dun & Bradstreet states that.
Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.
Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
A good description of a High-Performance team comes from an excellent work by Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D.K. (1993), The Wisdom of Teams. They state:
“A High-Performance team is a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they are mutually accountable.”
How is High-Performance Achieved?
Busy people do more and do it in less time if they use smart techniques and share common methods with each other. The secret to an ordinary team becoming a High-Performance Team is the application of workload in conjunction with High-Performance methods and techniques.
This approach strongly encourages adherence to the use of process, it facilitates true collaboration, gets more people involved with a task when necessary, each of whom is committed to its success. It forges closer work bonds and a prevailing attitude of ‘all for one and one for all’.
As more work is undertaken, the new methods and techniques become permanent and new levels of performance emerge.
The higher the workload, the more the methods and techniques come into play, resulting in Higher-Performance outcomes.
Performance and productivity receive an added boost when multiple team members or whole teams are focused on the same tasks. This works exceptionally well for IT for example, where more than one team is normally involved with the same job.
How exciting to see Russell publish some books based on his many years of corporate and media experience. I have worked with Russell a number of times in different organisations over many years and in all cases he has been an inspirational leader of change underpinned by exhausting energy, focus on quality delivery and a commitment to building a strong and enduring team. His books and articles will be well worth a read as a pragmatic guide for many CIOs, business executives and aspiring leaders.
Warwick Foster,
Director at LongBoard Advisory Services
You can either keep managing the way you are or look for a new approach. Successful management regimes of the past helped create today’s organizations that now defy traditional approaches to management. These organizations have flatter organization charts; intricate matrixed reporting lines, many horizontal interdependencies; and employees who know their jobs, goals and competitors better than they did decades ago. In a market in which change is speeding up, the incentive for business to review its approach to management has never been greater. High-Performance Teams are a proven solution to today’s and tomorrows management challenges.